6 Summer Salad Recipes I Stole from Ina Garten (Honestly Ranked)

If you're looking for summer salad recipes that don't involve turning on the oven during a heat wave, Ina Garten's deli salads are a pretty good place to start.

So I made six of them in one afternoon — fresh corn salad, roasted shrimp salad, tarragon potato salad, chicken salad Veronique, pasta pesto and peas, and the tomato feta pasta salad — and I rated every single one, zero to ten.

Five of these summer salad recipes earned a permanent spot in my rotation.

One of them wasted half a pound of perfectly good feta, and I'm still a little irritated about it.

Here's the full ranking, what I'd change about each recipe, and the one I'd skip entirely.

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Why Deli Salads Are My Favorite Summer Recipes

Deli salads are the make-once, eat-all-week category of summer cooking. You do one round of prep — most of it while something boils — and then you've got cold, filling food sitting in the fridge for days. No 5pm panic. No standing over a stove in July.

The other thing I love: almost all of these are make ahead salads by design. They actually taste better on day two, after the dressing has had time to soak in. If you've ever made a pasta salad and thought it was just okay, try it again the next day before you write it off.

The Rankings: 6 Ina Garten Salads, Tested and Rated

1. Fresh Corn Salad — 10/10

The winner, and it wasn't close. This summer corn salad is five ears of sweet corn (boiled about 3 minutes to pull some of the starch out), red onion, fresh basil, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. That's it.

I was nervous the apple cider vinegar would be too tangy, but it plays off the sweet corn perfectly. I cut the olive oil in half from what the recipe calls for and didn't miss it at all. I'd make this again tomorrow, and if I were taking it to a get-together, I'd double it — it disappears.

The corn trick you need: put a small bowl upside down inside a big bowl, stand the cob on it, and cut downward. The kernels fall into the big bowl instead of flying across your kitchen. I've done it straight on a cutting board before and cleaned corn off the floor for a week. 

2. Roasted Shrimp Salad — 10/10

The sleeper hit. The dressing is mayo, freshly squeezed orange juice, orange zest, a little white wine vinegar, fresh dill, capers, and red onion — light, tangy, and just different enough from the usual lemon-everything shrimp salad to feel special.

I used frozen shrimp I got on sale, and honestly? This recipe deserves better shrimp. It's the one recipe on this list where quality actually matters — the dressing is so light that the shrimp is doing the heavy lifting. Made as written with good shrimp, this might be the best thing in the post. Eat it on a brioche roll. Trust me on the roll.

3. Tarragon Potato Salad — 8.5/10

Two pounds of Yukon Golds, boiled whole, peeled, and sliced — not cubed, which felt wrong to me as a lifelong potato-cuber, but I followed the rules. The dressing is mayo, lemon juice, white wine vinegar, salt, and plenty of fresh-cracked pepper, folded in with scallions, red onion, fresh dill, and fresh tarragon.

The fresh dill and tarragon are what make it. My only complaint: not quite enough dressing for two pounds of potatoes. Next time I'd add an extra few tablespoons of mayo or use one less potato. It's very good. It is not better than my grandmother's potato salad, but nothing is, and I don't make the rules.

Pro tip: make the dressing separately and pour it over, instead of stirring everything into the potatoes. Your potatoes will crumble way less.

4. Pasta Pesto and Peas — 8/10

Homemade pesto (pine nuts, walnuts, garlic, five cups of basil, olive oil, Parmesan) mixed with mayo, lemon juice, and thawed frozen spinach, tossed with bow ties, fusilli, and peas. Ina says store-bought pesto is fine. She's right, and if basil costs as much where you live as it does in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa, store-bought might be the financially responsible choice.

It's rich — really rich — and genuinely good if you're a pesto person. If I made it again I'd lighten the dressing with Greek yogurt in place of some of the mayo and add extra lemon juice to brighten it up.

5. Chicken Salad Veronique — 7/10

"Veronique" apparently just means there are grapes in it, which I can respect. Rotisserie chicken breast (I skipped the roast-your-own step — done is better than perfect), green grapes, diced celery, fresh tarragon, mayo, salt, and pepper.

Here's the thing: the recipe calls for 1½ to 2 teaspoons of salt, and that is too much salt. I used the low end and still had to rescue it with a drizzle of honey and extra mayo thinned with milk. Start with a half teaspoon and taste. There's also not quite enough dressing to coat everything, so plan on extra mayo if you like a creamy chicken salad — and if you're putting it on bread, you do.

The tarragon is a genuinely nice change from my usual almond-and-red-grape version. I'd steal that and leave the rest.

6. Tomato Feta Pasta Salad — 4/10 (Skip It)

Every ranking needs a loser, and this is it. Fusilli, a full pound of feta, a pound of cherry tomatoes, Kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette — and somehow the result is dry. Too much pasta, too many tomatoes, not nearly enough vinaigrette to go around.

I used Kaizen pasta for this one, which I like and order directly from their site — but no pasta was saving this recipe. It's genuinely rare for an Ina Garten recipe to miss; I can count her fails on one hand. This is one of them. If you want tomatoes and feta in a pasta salad, find a different recipe — or double the vinaigrette, halve the pasta, and brace yourself.

I'm mostly mad about the feta.

Want my adapted versions of the five winners — with the salt fixed, the dressings right, and my notes baked in? Grab the free printable recipe cards below.

Make Ahead Salads: The Real Reason to Make All Six

Here's what I didn't expect: making six summer salad recipes in one afternoon was less work than making six separate dinners, because everything overlapped. The corn boiled while I diced onions. The potatoes steamed while I made pesto. By the time I cleaned up, I had a fridge full of lunches and sides for the entire week.

If you're going to batch these, a few things I learned:

• Refrigerate everything before you judge it. Every one of these tasted noticeably better after a few hours in the fridge. Make ahead salads need the rest — the dressing has to get acquainted with everything else.
• Under-salt on day one. Flavors concentrate as salads sit. The chicken salad taught me this the hard way.
• Make the dressing separately, always. It comes together better, and you control how much actually goes in.
• Double the corn salad. You'll be glad you did.

This is also exactly the kind of easy, low-stress cooking my weekly meal plans in The Dinner: Done Club are built around — real food, real budgets, no standing over a hot stove out of principle.

The Bottom Line

Ina Garten's deli salads are some of the best summer salad recipes I've tested in a long time — five out of six is a shockingly good hit rate for any cookbook author, and the fresh corn salad alone is worth the price of admission (which was corn). Make the corn salad first, splurge on decent shrimp for the shrimp salad, go easy on the salt in the chicken salad, and let the tomato feta pasta salad die peacefully in the pages of the cookbook where it belongs.

Download the free recipe cards, make a double batch of that corn salad, and thank me from your lawn chair.